Haines His Way

When I got back from a late lunch, I watched THE TUDORS. A compelling episode as always.


DR Elmore, what is the disease that they called "the sweating sickness." Obviously it's a plague of some kind, but what? Obviousnly not smallpox, but was it bubonic plague or what?

Didn't have time to watch anything in its entirety, so I noticed one of the HBO channels showing the 1959 HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, so I watched twenty minutes or so of it. I really enjoy this version even if there are some major differences between it and the novel.

I'm still thinking about foodstuffs.

Just saw the new NBC schedule at VARIETY.

Canceled shows: CROSSING JORDAN, RAINES, STUDIO 60, BLACK DONNALLEYS.

Not returning until 2008 - LAW & ORDER, MEDIUM , both on Sunday nights after NFL football season is over.

The only shows slid around are the Thursday comedies with 30 ROCK moving to 8:30 and THE OFFICE moving to 9 p.m. and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS which will air Fridays at 10.

NBC has also ordered six episodes of a HEROES spin-off called HEROES: ORIGINS, self-contained shows about new heroes not already a part of the regular series. The most popular character to emerge from these six hours will join the regular series.

The show will air during hiatus periods of the original HEROES.

When I got back from a late lunch, I watched THE TUDORS. A compelling episode as always.


DR Elmore, what is the disease that they called "the sweating sickness." Obviously it's a plague of some kind, but what? Obviousnly not smallpox, but was it bubonic plague or what?

DR MattH, I thought it was a form of the bubonic plague, but I was wrong.  It was clearly spread by ticks and lice, the filth and lack of sanitation at the time - also a heavy cause of death in childbirth.  Alison Weir, my trusty historian, only mentions the plague's occurrence, and Ann Boleyn's father also survived it at the same time although the series ignored that.  I looked it up on Wikipedia last night after the episode and here's what it told me (clear as mud):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness

And the word of the day is: AMBISINISTER!

Claude believed that wearing two right-handed gloves on an INTERIM BASIS helped curb his AMBISINISTER proclivities.

I'm STILL thinking about food.

It would stand to reason that I only recently came to "Crossing Jordan" and found it to my liking!

Oh, well.

And none of its previous five seasons has ever been released on DVD much to my surprise. The show today is VERY different from the initial seasons.

Oh, what the heck, before continuing to catch up, or pretending to, I might as well post.

Today, at the market, I managed to become the first to cause our self-checkout lanes to break down.

OK, that's really an exaggeration.  I was only the guy overseeing the four self-checkout lanes, helping the customers overcome whatever could go wrong.

But it did take place on my shift!

This is after three (count 'em, three!) shifts overseeing the self-checkout lanes.

Which is b-o-r-i-n-g.

I get paid good money as a checker.  I get paid the same amount of money to watch people do what I do better than they do, in order to satisfy their egos and make sure they don't try to stiff the store.  There is little job satisfaction in that.

But, back to the breakdown.

Not everything in the store has bar codes attached.  Produce, for example.  And in-house produced bakery items.

For these items, the customer is asked to push a "button" on the touch screen, which raises a list of pictures of the most popular items (such as bananas, Vidalia onions, that sort of thing), or to refine their search by "typing" on the touch screen "keyboard" the first few letters of what they are purchasing.  This brings up new lists of pictures, and hopefully the customer will find what they're purchasing on that list.

Today, at about one in the afternoon (ten in the morning, HHW time) the system broke down.  The computer refused to show any pictures, and refused to show a keyboard.

In other words, the computer developed an attitude.

Stacy (a front-end submanager) tried a "robot self-fix" subroutine, but it didn't self-fix, the computer just becams self-fixated.  Finally, after Cheryl (a front-end sub-submanager) had been kept on hold for a half-hour by our phone contact on fixing these things, we were told to completely shut it down and that they'd be sending someone to help.  Or something.

So, for the last fifty minutes of my shift today, I got to work at a real register, and communicate with real customers while getting all their groceries rung up faster than they could have done it themselves.

It felt good.

Great TOD
I wish I could remember a scene that shocked me. I am sure there was.

Deep Throat, perhaps?

Although, the most shocking part, as far as I was concerned, was that women would really wear that much make-up when, uh, you know...

I mean, doesn't the make-up smear?

 

One reason I have suspicions about the "Forever Stamp' is an uneasy feeling I have that the USPS knows something the American public does not know.

Perhaps it knows it will not, ultimately, lose anything if people buy billions of dollars in "Forever Stamps".  

Maybe it will make "First Class" postage less reliable in favor of something else upon which we cannot use "Forever Stamps".

I smell a "scam" and I have only the Bush Administration to blame for my suspicions.  Which isn't something I take lately.

But the Forever Stamps are so pretty!

Just so we're clear on this, the American public would have to buy 2,439,024,390 Forever Stamps in order to spend just one, single solitary billion dollars on them.  Since they are most often sold in packs of twenty, that means 301,114,122 packs will have to be sold to reach this goal.

So much for hyperbole.

Whilst I've been sitting here doing work on Ye Olde Laptop, I've been listening to John Williams' brilliant score to the motion picture A.I.  Most of you know I feel differently about this film than most do - I think it's wonderful and now may have to watch it again.  The CD I'm listening to is an amalgam of the soundtrack CD, the 2 CD Academy promo and a couple of other sources - it's complete, and in show order.